


The Summer Court (Drabble)

by Phoenix1966



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - No Angels, Fae & Fairies, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, M/M, Minor Character Death, Pre-Series Dean Winchester, Pre-Series Sam Winchester, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 08:00:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14564553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Phoenix1966/pseuds/Phoenix1966
Summary: Sammy was growing up and Dean wasn't too sure how he felt about that. Dean wasn't sure about a lot of things when it came to Sammy. But he never thought he'd lose his 16-year-old brother on a hunt like that.And he never believed he'd find him again, ten years later, still a 16-year-old.





	The Summer Court (Drabble)

**Author's Note:**

> Standard disclaimer applies that this was all for fun and no profit was made and no copyright infringement intended.
> 
> I do not give permission for anyone to share, repost or archive my works anywhere. If this continues, I will delete all my work and no longer post.

Dean walked with slow, deliberate steps through the glade. It was almost dusk and he tried to remind himself that he was here on a case. Here, where he could almost hear his brother’s voice brush against his ear. The place of his greatest loss. He was back.

He and John (never “Dad” in his head, not after what happened) and Sammy were investigating a rash of disappearances in the woods around Walden Pond that strange spring. Sammy couldn’t shut up about the place, going on and on about how Thoreau had lived in that very spot and wrote a book that he still lugged around, even though the school he’d had to read it for was two towns and four hunts behind them.

“You know,” he’d whispered to Dean while they trudged through the spring mud skirting the pond, “they used to believe this was bottomless.”

Dean had grunted, hoping to come off indifferent and maybe then Sam would shut up. At twenty, Dean had abandoned thoughts and dreams of school, marching in his father’s shadowed footsteps. But not Sammy. Sammy didn’t seem to want to fall in line beside them. And Dean couldn’t help but notice when his little brother (not so little 16-year-old boy-becoming-a-man body that Dean found unsettling to look at sometimes for reasons he couldn’t admit to) waxed poetic about Thoreau’s book being a manual for self-reliance, a voyage of spiritual discovery and a declaration of personal independence, there was a gleam in his baby brother’s eyes that hadn’t been there since a box of fireworks and an abandoned field on fire too many summers ago. And even though Dean could face down a werewolf without flinching, he couldn’t meet Sammy’s fevered gaze.

“Keep it down,” he’d snapped, sounding more like their father that day, “and stay sharp.”

Sammy had snorted, “You’re not Dad,” with all the petulant sulkiness of the teenager he was.

“And you’re damn lucky I’m not. He’d have had you doing push-ups for not staying focused on a hunt where people were going missing.”

“I know,” had been Sammy’s murmured reply, but whether it was to the first or second part of what he said, Dean had no idea. He shook his head, silently kicking his own ass for worrying about what his kid brother thought of him at a time like that.

When they caught up to John, the man had been crouched low, rubbing his hands along the grass in a small clearing. In the fading twilight, purple and strange, Dean had nearly missed the distinctively raised mound of darker blades.

“Fairy ring,” he had muttered, and John nodded in silent agreement.

There had been more to it than that. Young boys gone on moonlit nights, John’s insistence that they handle the case even though Bobby had offered to go in their place (and that had been a shock to Dean since the other hunter and John had recently had a falling out that ended with weapons drawn and blood almost spilled). It would be weeks later before Dean connected the terrible dots that John had split them up and left Sammy alone on purpose.

“Dean,” he’d barked, “I want you to come with me. Sam,” he’d paused and gave his youngest an unreadable look that stopped him in his tracks, “you stay here.”

Dean had been about to object, a relative first for him, when Sammy had scowled.

“Why can’t I come with you? You dragged me out this far.” And there had been the petulance, tinged with rebellion, that Dean had been hearing more and more of lately.

“Because I need you to follow orders without all the questions,” John hissed. “Something you seem to have trouble with, unlike your brother.” And whatever had been in that strange look of John’s morphed into firm resolve. “Let’s go, Dean,” and he had stomped off deeper into the gloom. “I need you with me.”

Dean had stood there, torn between his ingrained training and his brother. He found himself stuck there a lot lately, trying to navigate between the two most important people in his life like Odysseus between the Scylla and Charybdis. Either one could break him and one of them surely would. In the end, it hadn’t been the one he’d been expecting. Hunters always said it was the monster you didn’t hear that killed you.

Maybe if Sammy had insisted a little harder, Dean would have found the courage to stay. Maybe. But that was just victim blaming, Dean came to realize years later. He had been a coward in the face of his father’s disapproval. He’d looked at his brother, strange eyes not quite blue and not quite green (“Do you think he has your mother’s eyes?” John had asked him once, strangely searching for a resemblance on a night when Johnny, Jack and Jose had been better company than his sons) hidden by his unruly bangs, wanting Sam to ask him to stay. Or take him with them. But Sammy had stood there, skinny and pale, quiet as a grave. Dean hitched his pack higher up on his shoulder and gave his little brother a quick nod, no more than a snap of his chin. If he had known it was going to be the last time his saw Sammy, he would have said something more, something that mattered. He hoped he would have, at any rate.

Pushing into the thickening wood, the last thing he heard his brother say was, “I wish…”

John had dragged him far into the darkness and Dean had followed, despite the dread that grew in his stomach like a cancer, eating him up from the inside. Leaving (abandoning) Sammy like that, forlorn and wishing in a fairy circle had been too much like tempting fate. And it had.

By the time the abandoned campsite John had insisted held a clue as to what was taking the boys had been thoroughly investigated and John couldn’t come up with another reason not to return to Sammy, Dean had been off like a shot. But it didn’t matter how fast he ran, Dean had been too late. And part of him knew he would be.

They looked, of course, and John seemed truly devastated. But there had been relief there, too, that Dean recognized weeks later when John made his dark confession. Sammy had been tainted as a baby, innocent in his crib. Tainted with  _demon blood_  by the same demon who had killed Mom. John had blurted out that Sammy was a  _special child_  and one destined to lead armies from Hell because of it. All his research had proven there was no way to save Sammy and at some point, they (like Dean would ever had had a hand in it) would have had to kill Sam. Bobby had apparently disagreed and that had been the reason behind their explosive argument months before.

Like a lie of omission, unwilling to kill Sammy outright, John had brought them to Walden Pond (“’I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,’ was what he wrote, Dean. Isn’t that an amazing line?”) to let something else do his dirty work. And John had made Dean abandon Sammy twice when they didn’t find his body. He was simply another teenage boy gone missing. Whatever had happened to them, Sammy had been enough. It wasn’t hungry any longer. No one vanished after him.

They’d split up after that, each hunter going their own way. Dean couldn’t look him in the eye and John knew his remaining son no longer had his back; he deserved no less. When word reached Dean that John had gone down fighting a nest of vamps two years later, Dean tried to mourn him. He really did. But the man who had been his father had died the night Dean’s mother had. He stopped being a decent human the night he let Sammy go. And Dean suspected John knew that, too.

The years slipped away and Dean kept on hunting. There was nothing else in his life and he was good at it. He was the kind of hunter others wanted by their side right up until the fight was over. Then, they wanted him gone as silently as he had arrived. Others saw the darkness Dean carried, wrapped around him like a cloak. He was a haunted man and cursed, some would whisper. Dean didn’t think they were wrong.

When the ten-year anniversary of Sammy’s disappearance (never referred to as a death) came due, it really shouldn’t have been a surprise that Bobby called him to say the troubles had returned to Walden Pond. Young boys—outsiders amongst their peers—had gone missing again. The grizzled hunter knew better than to offer this hunt to anyone else. Walden was sacred to Dean.

Despite the time that had passed, Dean needed no GPS to bring him to the exact spot Sammy had once stood. Nothing had changed, and Dean shivered when he brushed his hands over the darker grass, still raised and sharper than anything else in the glade. He dropped down to sit cross-legged on the ground, no need to go any farther. His left knee popped in protest. Only thirty, he had been hard on his body, agreeing with Indiana Jones that it was the mileage and not the years.

When it was almost too dark to see well, Dean built a fire in the center of the ring and he waited. But nothing came. Almost reluctantly, he rifled around his pack until his fingers brushed against a familiar, worn cover. He pulled  _Walden_  out and opened the book to that familiar passage.

“’I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,’” he began, voice dry and cracked. He didn’t need to read the book to recite the lines, having memorized them ten years ago. But holding the book was comforting; it was the last thing Sammy had loved and held.

“’I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,’ sounds like a vamp to me, Sammy.” He coughed and continued on when no one snarked about his commentary, when no one ever would again, “’to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.’”

There was more, but Dean grew silent. There were too many ghosts in the air tonight, creeping close and listening. Without really planning to, Dean threw the book into the fire. The pages curled and charred before fluttering into the air like singed moths. It’s what hunters did when one of theirs died. It’s what hunters did to put ghosts down. It’s what Dean did, when the ache in his heart over his brother grew too black. And then, where no one could see, he cried for everything that he’d lost, repeating, “I wish” again and again like it could change things. The night listened.

*****

Dean woke, groggy and hazy, surprised he had managed to fall asleep so soundly. By the gray, misty light, he figured it was nearly dawn. The fire had burned down hours ago and when he spotted a fragment of the beloved paperback’s spine in the ashes, like a bare bone pushing up from a grave, tears welled in his eyes again. Wiping at his face viciously, he rose on stiff limbs, desperate to outrun his sadness. Dean staggered back into the woods to relieve himself, unwilling to desecrate his brother’s resting spot. As he was shaking himself off, a light flickered in the corner of his eye. He zipped up so fast he almost hurt himself, but what was back in the clearing brought him to a standstill. Dean stared for a long time before taking the slow, cautious steps forward of an unbeliever.

Rising sun behind him, a willowy creature stood barefoot in the glade. He had wild, dark hair and wore wisps of material that could barely be called clothing and covered almost none of his milky skin. There was no mistaking, however, the delicate, gossamer wings protruding from his back. And there was also no mistaking the moles and pointed nose of his still 16-year-old brother even if Dean had to squint to make out his features.

“Sammy,” Dean croaked.

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> So...this is inspired by the art I did above. I hope to have the time again one day to write this all down (and, of course, I hope to have a job again one day). Consider this the bare bones of a larger tale. Please don't ask for updates, because I don't have a job right now.
> 
> Just take this as a peek into something I'd like to flesh out.
> 
> Rebloggable version for Tumblr [here](http://phoenix1966sbottom.tumblr.com/post/173654911374/this-isnt-a-story-but-the-bare-bones-of-a-larger) .


End file.
